Allan Sekula, Gas Terminal, Barcelona (2008) from the series "Methane for all."

When an American crew picked up the first of these ships from the Daewoo dockyard, completed the sea trials, and began the voyage back across the Pacific, they discovered in the nooks and crannies of the new ship a curious inventory of discarded tools used in the building of the vessel: crude hammers made by welding a heavy bolt onto the end of a length of pipe, wrenches cut roughly by torch from scraps of deck plate. Awed by this evidence of an improvisatory iron-age approach to ship building, which corresponded to their earlier impression of the often-lethal brutality of Korean industrial methods, they gathered the tools into a small display in the crew's lounge, christening it "The Korean Workers' Museum."

If we lift up the manhole cover, lock-out the equipment, unscrew the housing, and break the word into components, infrastructure means, simply, below-structure. Like infrared, the below-red energy just outside of the reddish portion of the visible light section of the electromagnetic spectrum. Humans are not equipped to see infrared with our evolved eyes, but we sometimes feel it as radiated heat.

Infrastructure is drastically important to our way of life, and largely kept out of sight. It is the underground, the conduited, the containerized, the concreted, the shielded, the buried, the built up, the broadcast, the palletized, the addressed, the routed. It is the underneath, the chassis, the network, the hidden system, the combine, the conspiracy. There is something of a paranoiac, occult quality to it. James Tilly Matthews, one of the first documented cases of what we now call schizophrenia, spoke of a thematic style of hallucination described by many suffering from the condition, always rewritten in the technological language of the era. In Matthews' 18th Century description, there existed an invisible "air loom," an influencing machine harnessing rays, magnets, and gases, run by a secret cabal, able to control people for nefarious motives. Infrastructure's power, combined with its lack of visibility, is the stuff of our society's physical unconscious.

Chris Anderson has famously compared the nascent drone market to the early days of PCs, comparing it with the Homebrew Computer Club, the Bay Area hobbyist meetup where the Apple I was first unveiled. It may seem an odd comparison—the drone is thought of as military technology and (more recently) luxury plaything, while the Homebrew Computer Club is remembered for its utopian beliefs about putting technology into the hands of the people. But while Apple's forays into personal computers were groundbreaking, the "PC" abbreviation historically referred to its greatest threat, the IBM PC standard, a revolutionary form of computer architecture that was easily licensed and copied, and which shaped the personal computer market for over a decade. Drones do not yet have a "PC standard," but if they did, it might be the tipping point that could catapult drones into the mainstream and unlock their social utility.

We have yet to see what this social utility will be. Militarized drone technology has a well-established place among the many tools of the surveillance state. Looking at the history of the computer's shift from an awkward, heavy, military and commercial engineering project to something we carry in our pockets, one wonders how drones might make a similar transition. Some of the first ideas for non-military drones, such as catching poachers, have some way to go in development before they will actually be useful. So far, one of the best uses for drone technology is in the field of cartography. Drones like senseFly's eBee can map a large area very quickly, and rectify imagery to GPS maps. But drones like these cost thousands of dollars and run proprietary software in order to work so seamlessly. What if drone technology were to be transformed in a similar manner to computers, so that standard architecture and operating systems allowed cheaper, more universal hardware and software?

In the late 1970s, desk-sized computers were typically terminals linked to mainframes where the real processing was done. But with the miniaturization of transistor functions into integrated circuits, desktop computers became possible.These early personal computers were sold as kits, and required a hefty investment as well as technical know-how to assemble and operate. When the Apple II was introduced in 1977, it was one of the first "out of the box" personal computers; BYTE magazine called it the first "appliance computer". But the Apple II was still expensive, and with an operating system and architecture limited to this machine only, all compatible software had to be designed specifically for this system. In 1980, less than 10% of 14 million small businesses in the US had personal computers, and of large corporations, less than 3% used personal computers on a regular basis.1 Investing in a limited hobby system was not a priority for most companies.

Let us summarize the principal characteristics of a rhizome: unlike trees or their roots, the rhizome connects any point to any other point [...] It is composed not of units but of dimensions, or rather directions in motion. It has neither beginning nor end, but always a middle (milieu) from which it grows and which it overspills.

- Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

Thus is described the rhizome, the symbol of the internet age. When Michel Foucault said that the 20th century may one day be called Deleuzian, it is doubtful that this is what he intended. And yet, the language of this young, networked century so far is mimicking the speech of the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.

The language of Deleuze and Guattari is employed by everyone from the Israeli Defense Forces to this arts website, including any number of for-profit and non-profit startups in between those poles. War machines, companies, NGOs, and arts organizations all find utility in a philosophy that describes systems moving according to programmatic algorithms, breaking through what was solid, and re-writing the codes of meaning. War, commodities, society, and art all function according to their own programming. The public is coming to terms with the knowledge that the internal coding of networks is what defines future possibilities in the 21st century.

And yet, we are often too quick to tell ourselves that this programming can be rewritten for the greater social good. In our enthusiasm for the rhizomatic fruits of this new century, we often neglect the technology itself, replacing it with our ideas of what the technology could be. It is far easier to wield ideologically expedient speculative fictions than to develop socially expedient tools.

Consider what might be the most rhizomatic technology of them all: the mesh network. In words it is the perfect rhizome. Independent nodes set up the same piece of software in their network router. Every router connects to every other router, forming a multi-dimensional web with no central point to be disabled. It is "legion," to use a familiar term from contemporary parlance: each point is not a separate unit, but n-dimensions of distributed power. Some routers are designed to connect to each other ad hoc, over the air, without needing any wires between them. Even cell phones can connect in such a mesh, promoting a vision of infinite, pocket-sized nodes, deployed at a protest or as a hedge against infrastructure-destroying natural disaster. They could be manufactured in bulk, as cheap as a Raspberry Pi, solar-powered, disguised as innocuous light fixtures or other small appliances. The mesh network vision is of a rhizomatic network that is local, horizontal, self-healing, non-hierarchical, and scalable. Philosophically, its kung fu is perfect—bending like a reed in the wind against any foe, whether deployed by Occupy, by Egyptian revolutionaries, against censorship, war, flooding, poverty, or ISPs. In language, it is everything we expect from the future, the fantasy of certain post-structural technological desires.

I woke up at the chime, looked at the mobile. New work available. I clocked in, made coffee, sat at the desk. Two hours of work right away, even before Twitter. Felt accomplished. I invoiced, and collected.

I met Sandra for breakfast. She's in Miami. She had the ceiling open to let in the sun. She got into a new task queue, editorial work. It's good work, she said, even though the pay isn't quite as good as advertising. What's the difference, I said, sipping my Bloody Mary. Different algorithmic authors, same algorithmic grammar problems.

There is a sense in which all architecture is authoritarian, regardless of its ideals. No matter how many community meetings a planning process incorporates, in the end only one building may be built; one architecture, which by its very existence precludes another. The eventual users and non-users of the space may make minor modifications. They may open or close windows, but in the end they must deal with the consequences of the building, whether it is a postwar housing project or a San Jose strip mall. They must negotiate its little manipulations, and have little in the way of recourse if these should become oppressive.

Artists, at least of a particular bent, are not the sort to take authority at its word. Even under the most oppressive of conditions artists find ways to critique and to criticize, and to present alternate theories of the world. They respond to all forms of power, architecture included, through gestures that range from the most basic act of graffiti to Ai Weiwei's "studies of perspective."

The Weird Shift Storefront is currently seeking submissions of work, research, events, performances, shares of any kind.

Weird Shift is a six-month multi-faceted project, designed to create a community culture around lesser-known areas of knowledge. Weird Shift’s purpose is to collect, document, share, and thereby stimulate the investigation of illuminating and exciting marginalia. By providing events for visitors to share and learn about sideline intellectual pursuits and performances, Weird Shift creates a community culture around minor areas of knowledge that include local and regional arcana, anecdotal stories, speculative histories, and vernacular electronics. By offering a physical space in which the Archives of the Weird Shift can be made publicly available and curated for display, Weird Shift shares the work of many people and inspires visitors to pursue their own alternative research. And by having staff on hand in the space to engage community members, Weird Shift supports this culture and offers its resources to those who can use them for further weird marginalia studies.

We want you to be part of this space, to come in and work with us to promote this sort of research into marginal studies. We are looking for workshops, lectures, art installations, performances, events, games, skill shares, paper presentations, speeches, individual artworks, and general research that can be incorporated into the archive.

Our current schedule will run the space between April and October, 2014. The storefront is located in Portland, Oregon.

Tell us two things: 1) what you want to do, and; 2) some possible dates when you could do it. Currently we have an open call for visual artworks, performances, lectures etc. and there will be more specific calls for curated selections at later dates.

We are also interested in remotely-delivered projects, via network, phone, or mail.

Scheduling is happening now on a rolling basis! Get in touch today!

Weird Shift Storefront is supported by the Precipice fund and FreeGeek project grants.

Block quote fail! The first paragraph is actually meant to be a block quote, as those are Sebald's words. The second paragraph is me responding to his words, which were published in 1999, so I have the benefit of another 13 years of history on my side, when I claim that objective truth, in the age of Wikipedia and other new media projects, is more complicated. Perhaps that makes things a bit clearer. (Working to fix the formatting now.)

I personally believe in facts, rather than truth. Facts are beholden to their context, which is a terrain of other facts. There is no singular truth, but there is a preponderance of facts mapped and understood in context. Continuing to add these constituent facts into our reality is much more important than attempting to label a single, authentic reality.

So as that relates to technological surveillance, it is important to incorporate the many things that the US government is doing, in that regard, into our worldview as fact. These are not potentials, to be held up and weighed against a background of "ethical, legal action", or "just war", or any other proclaimed field on which we can argue back and forth, "is X really torture or not?" While these debates of objective truth spiral around the front pages of the newspaper, the actions continue to occur, as facts. That is what is important, in my opinion.

In both of this comments, it is a good point that the resources and technological advances in different aspects of the production process, not just the "scanner/printer" per se, are what will be the defining factor in the way the market evolves. The scanner/printer is a consumer object in itself, because it conceptually makes the fabbing process a "one-machine" activity for certain users. But production, as always, is a much wider domain than any particular machine.

Per this particular comment, I just want to add something about the parallel to paper-printing technology. Again, it is a conceptual issue of what is a "machine. The idea of a "desktop printer", or a "Print-On-Demand" printer, is similar to that of a "3D Printer". It in itself is a consumer unit, that doesn't really address the technology inside. A desktop color laser printer has basically the same quality print engine as an in-line "book machine". What defines the ability to make a book is the right paper, the pre-press know-how, and in-line bindery functions. If someone knows InDesign and is willing to cut and bind a book by hand, they could indeed make a professional-quality book with a $300 desktop printer. It is because we, as both users and consumers, privilege the all-in-one process of the machine (despite the fact that book-machines aren't magic and are difficult to use with consistent quality) that we think of certain machine set-ups as having this singular ability, when actually the technology is a much wider field.

So when we say that consumers will always get better quality or speed or value by going to a "professional", weren't not really talking about the operator, the owner, or the technology itself, but we're talking about access to certain technologies, and the skills to use them all together. No offense to either of the commenters here, whose skills and experience are no doubt well-earned; but I think that while these skills will still be real and crucial, they will be, in the near future, distributed outside of "professional" industry. I'm saying this from my particular experience in paper printing. There is still a necessary investment in skill and equipment, but it is leaving the "industry". Coffee shops are getting bookmaking machines. Offices are getting bindery equipment. Individuals are learning to cloth-bind books, for no other reason than they want to do so. Perhaps this is a feature of the changing nature of "professionalism" in industry, or because of the cheapening of technology. But either way, it's interesting to watch.